Scream in gay

If you’re still wondering about those homoerotic undertones 25 years after Billy Loomis and Stu Macher terrorized Woodsboro in Wes Craven’s “Scream,” you’ve been on the right track all along.

Ahead of the new “Scream,” out Friday, openly gay screenwriter of the first “Scream," Kevin Williamson, has confirmed that Billy (Skeet Ulrich) and Stu (Matthew Lillard), who are thought to be queer by many LGBTQ+ fan theorists, were based on infamous mass murderers Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr. and Richard Albert Loeb, both of whom reportedly admitted they were gay and in a relationship.

In May 1924, Leopold and Loeb, who’ve been called the “LGBTQ+ prototype for Bonnie and Clyde,” killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks as an act of intellectual superiority. It’s been called the “perfect crime,” one that has influenced Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” as well as the 2002 crime thriller “Murder by Numbers.” Both are noted for their homoeroticism.



Now, nearly three decades after “Scre

Scream 6 Finally Delivers Non-Coded Queerness

Mindy Meeks-Martin, a queer Jet horror film geek, is back and helps the franchise (finally) offer up full-blown, uncoded queerness…

For decades, LGBTQ2+ horror fans were left to decipher subtle hints of queer representation in the Scream franchise. It was more than 25 years before the franchise went beyond queerbaiting and gave these fans what they deserved: an openly queer character.

In 2022, the “requel” was born with the fifth installment of Scream, and with it came a character who openly and unapologetically displayed her queerness. Mindy Meeks-Martin, a queer Black horror film enthusiast, survived yet another Woodsboro massacre at the hands of Ghostface along with her friends Sam (Melissa Barrera), Tara (Jenna Ortega), and Chad (Mason Gooding).

In the new Scream VI, the “Core Four” characters relocate to New York Urban area, where Mindy proudly sports pro-gay shirts while attending college with her friends. She also has a girlfriend, and many of their shared scenes involve the two kissing

Scream's LGBT+ Legacy Is More Than a Meme - It's Built Into the Franchise

Summary

  • Scream is for the gays. It's a classic online meme at this point that every gay person loves Scream, but it's more than just an inside joke - it has a lot of weight behind it. From drag cabarets to the recent Vegas musical adaptation, it has thrived in gay media.
  • The first Scream leans into subtext that is traditionally queer, namely the unspoken agreement that Stu is in love with Billy Loomis (confirmed time and again by the cast and writer). It's also unapologetically sexual and protective of its final girls, eschewing the one-dimensional tropes for flawed, complicated female leads that survive the sequels again and again.
  • Subsequent Screams also lean into another classic queer trope: campiness, with Scream 3 in particular being filled with universal gay icons such as Laurie Metcalf, Parker Posey, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Carrie Fisher, while

    (This article contains spoilers for the most recent ‘Scream’ films, including ‘Scream VI‘.)

    While watching Scream VI at the cinema for the first time on opening weekend, there was one scene in particular that made me feel uneasy. It comes about halfway through the film and involves Anika Kayoko (Devyn Nekoda) trying to escape masked killer Ghostface after being brutally attacked, bleeding out while her girlfriend Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown) shouts for her to crawl across to safety. As Ghostface shakes the ladder while a terrified Anika tries to join Mindy and her friends on the other side, I was shaken up, tightly squeezing my possess girlfriend’s hand as we watched it play out on screen. 

    Even now I still find myself wanting to verb away, dreading the horrific moment Anika falls to her death while Mindy watches from above. I was hopeful they would both survive, especially with recent genre films like the Fear Street trilogy and Bodies Bodies Bodies that see their sapphic protagonists create it to the end; final girlfriends, if you will